I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.

My first book, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996. The book, which chronicled my experiences covering the Bosnian conflict, won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for nonfiction) and the Overseas Press Club Book Prize, and was a finalist for several other literary awards. In 1997, after working for a year in Washington as a staff writer for the Post, I left the paper and moved to New York City, where I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Foreign Policy, among others. In 2001, I reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan about the post-Taliban era, and I reported from Iraq about the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. In 2009, Knopf published my second book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 2014, I became a senior editor at The Intercept, a publication of First Look Media.

On the academic side of things, I was a visiting professor at Princeton in 2008, a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center in 2010, a master class professor at Columbia in 2012 and I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.